Week 1 Design Process

This week we had our first meeting as a group to brainstorm ideas for the folie. We discussed a variety of ways of teaching people about a subject, and ultimately decided that we wanted to teach people through experience, rather than through information being explicitly given. During our discussions we talked particularly about the notion of teaching people about the natural elements that affect the site (an idea that Craig initially thought of) such as sunlight, wind and the water of the river. We thought it would be interesting to have the elements of the folie affected by the change of these elements, so that through the use of folie, people come to recognise that these changes are corresponding to other changes that they can see around them. For instance, a wall moves and reveals the river, which users notice has dropped to a lower level.

The second idea that we discussed as a potential for our folie was one that I introduced that would teach people about the qualities of different spaces. To pass through the folie, users would pass through a series of different sized and lit spaces, each of them producing a different feeling. In the end we decided that we might come up with some more unusual ideas if we went away separately, researched the area and came up with a theme or subject that we would like to teach about, and come up with our own individual design to bring to the next group meeting.

I went away and looked at the site by myself. After tracing over the lines of the city, I noticed that there was a distinct juxtaposition between the grids of the streets and the bold curves that occasionally appeared, and thought that this might be an interesting abstraction to use in our design.

In regards to the subject that I wanted to teach about, my first instinct was to investigate the history of the wharves. From the Brisbane City Council website history, I found out that the building of the wharves had created a huge number of jobs for the people of the city, but that they had ceased work due to the commencement of World War II. Air shelters were built on the site, and I thought it might be interesting to consider building a folie that tried to recreate some of the spatial feelings of hiding in the air raid shelters during war time. I was inspired partly by the way that the Jewish Memorial in Berlin aims to give users an awareness of the suffering of the Jews during the war through a spatial experience, and thought that could be useful and unusual on the site. After looking at the proposed plans for the site, however, I saw that it was already planned that the shelters would be restored and a thorough history of the site given.

My mind began to turn instead back to the river, and the impact that it had had on the city. It was a force that both gave and took away from the inhabitants of the city, and I thought that through our previous idea of movement within the folie, we could come up with a very interesting concept that way. The river had provided jobs for the inhabitants when the wharves were built, but had also taken away from them during the two major floods of the city in 1974 and 2011. My initial design that I took to the next group meeting used the curves and grids that I had taken from the aerial view of the city, and created a folie whose walls moved during the different tides of the river to create different spaces at different times of day.